2019 book 8

Sheri S. Tepper's Gibbon's Decline and Fall
Do you know, I'm not sure I've ever read any Tepper before--at least not since I started this blog in 2004, anyway. I want to read more feminist speculative fiction classics, though, and this one seemed interesting (and surprisingly relevant to Our Current Times). Things start with five college girls in 1959, struggling with the societal issues of the day, vowing lifelong friendship--and then the story jumps ahead to the year 2000 (still slightly in the future when the novel was written), where one of the women, a retired lawyer, is asked to defend a young woman being used as a political pawn by an ambitious politician, and a mysterious epidemic is spreading. At first I was into the narrative voice--everything with the women is great--but things soon turn sinister and grim and weird. (I was also not into the various characters written in dialect.) I kind of wished things were less heavy-handed? I just can't decide how I feel about this. It was awesome to have a group of middle-aged ladies fighting the forces of evil, though. Content warning for a lot of rape. B.